WINSHIP EXPANDS HOSPITAL ACCESS

Winship Cancer Institute has expanded access to its high quality cancer care in alignment with its broad clinical research program at both Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital (ESJH) and Emory Johns Creek Hospital (EJCH). In addition, Winship has established the Winship Cancer Network as a means to improve access to such vital services throughout Georgia and the Southeast.

Longstanding and continued support from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has enabled Winship to advance cancer care and access to services like these for tens of thousands of patients throughout

Brat explains, “The use of the biomarkers in the diagnosis of these forms of brain tumors will lead to a much more consistent manner of diagnosis and patient management. It will also allow us to investigate these tumors as unified groups in a way that should advance our understanding.”

Brat will join an international group of neuropathologists in Heidelberg, Germany, meeting this summer to revise the World Health Organization classification of brain tumors based on new molecular findings. This is a major step in starting to classify and treat brain tumors more precisely based on their genetic makeup.

Georgia and beyond.

In addition to expanding services at ESJH and EJCH, the Woodruff Foundation’s most recent grant will be used to expand and improve Winship’s Shared Resource portfolio with special emphasis on its Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program. Researchers in this program are continually evaluating the best methods to reduce and eliminate the development of cancer among highrisk individuals across Georgia and the Southeast.

Fadlo R. Khuri, deputy director of Winship Cancer Institute, chair of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology, and executive associate dean for research at Emory University School of Medicine, was named president of American University of Beirut (AUB) in Beirut, Lebanon. He will begin his tenure there on September 1, 2015.

Khuri, who is also the Roberto C. Goizueta Distinguished Chair for Cancer Research, is considered one of the leading translational clinical investigators and physicians in lung and aerodigestive medical oncology in the world. In his 13 years at Emory, Khuri has been instrumental in leading the development of some of the most important cancer-related programs in Georgia and throughout the nation.

Researchers Receive NCI Informatics Award

Two Winship researchers will receive a $3.5 million Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) U24 award from the National Cancer Institute. David Gutman and Lee Cooper, assistant professors in the Departments of Neurology, Biomedical Informatics, and Biomedical Engineering, will use the five-year award to develop software tools to help researchers gain new insights from cancer imaging data. The award will set the stage for novel applications in human cancer research, both at Winship as well as for the cancer research community as a whole.

Their work is focused on digital microscopy images of tissue slides that have traditionally been used by pathologists for diagnostic purposes. Advances in technology allow these slides to be stored as digital images, producing massive databases that can be explored using data analytics algorithms. “Our goal is to build tools to identify visual patterns in these images that can help us better understand cancer biology, or to improve accuracy of cancer prognosis,” says Gutman. “This award is unique because it lets us take the tools we have developed beyond our labs to create an open-source resource for the cancer research community at large.”

ITCR awards are intended to build tools to address the growing number of “big data” problems impeding cancer research. “All areas of medicine are experiencing an explosion of data, but this is especially true in cancer,” says Cooper. “Transforming cancer data into knowledge that can benefit patients is one of the major challenges facing cancer researchers today.”